Why It’s Smart To Link To Other Websites
Have you ever heard that it was bad to link to other websites? That by doing so you were essentially sending your readers away from your own website, off to another place where they may never return from?
Keeping website readers on your own site incredibly important. The longer they stay on your site, the more information they receive, the more likely you are to produce a sale (gain a new student), and the better your overall conversion rates will be.
But linking out to another website and sending traffic away from your own site is not always a bad idea. In fact, in some cases, it’s an excellent strategy for growing your school’s online presence.
Social Media
Imagine for a minute that your school is using social media accounts at sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote your school and communicate with the people in your community. Without linking to these various social media profiles, how do you expect your parents, teachers, students and community members to find you on these various social networks?
Many organizations make this mistake. They sign up for social media accounts and are then afraid to link to their own social media profiles because they’re afraid of sending their website readers off to another website where they may never return.
But by not linking out to their own social media profiles, they are limiting their growth on such sites.
Linking out to your own social networks from your school website is the number one way to let your community know that your school is using social media. Without linking out to these various profiles on your website, you will have to rely on paper newsletter, word of mouth, and good old fashioned luck in order to grow your social media presence. This, in my opinion at least, is just plain silly.
Linking out to your own social media profiles is not only smart, but it is necessary to growing your community in these various online networks. You can’t create a following on Facebook or Twitter unless you link out to these sites and let your community know that they can connect with you there.
Blogs
Blogs are another kind of site that many school organizations are afraid to link to. The personal nature of some blogs and websites makes school officials fear that by linking to such sites they are devaluing their own message and at the same time, sending their own readers away from their own site.
But linking to blogs is one of the best things you can do to build up your status and online presence in your community.
When you link to a blog, a “trackback” is created between your website and that blog.
If you don’t know what a “trackback” is, a “trackback” is form of “blog conversation” that links two or more relevant blog entries together.
It starts by one blogger writing an article that references, links to, or is relevant to another blog article. When the blogger publishes the article linking to the other blog, the blog leaves a “trackback” on the other blog’s article, which usually appears in the comments area as a truncated summary with a link.
Trackbacks are good because they bring traffic to your own website when you trackback other blogs. Being the “victim” of a trackback is also good because it means another blogger has read your website and deemed something you wrote worthy of including in their blog. There is a good chance that if they trackbacked you that they also made a direct link to your blog as well.
So, why is this important?
Trackbacks help you build social proof online in your community because it provides evidence that other people are reading and responding to your website content.
This may be a bit over some readers heads, especially if you’ve never run a blog of your own. But that’s okay! All you need to understand is that when you link to another blog, the owner of that blog receives a message telling them that you linked to their website. And once this happens, most bloggers will come to your website, check out your content… and some may even link back to you – providing you with valuable new readers in the future.
Summary
Linking out can be a bit scary for some organizations and school officials. Sending readers away from your own site can be a scary idea for some. But if you send your readers to the right websites, it can not only be a smart move, but it can be crucial to building your online profiles elsewhere and establishing social proof within your community.
Now get to it… and start linking out!
